"Finally," he said.
"You cannot say finally. You spent months trying to separate them."
"I spent months being wrong. I have since corrected my error. Bingley deserves your sister. She is the only woman alive who will tolerate his taste in wallpaper."
Elizabeth laughed so hard she nearly fell off her chair, and Darcy watched her with the particular expression he wore when she was being most herself: a look of such unbridled, unguarded adoration that it would have embarrassed him in public and was therefore reserved strictly for private moments. And kitchen encounters with cats.
Georgiana was flourishing. The shy, stammering girl who had greeted Elizabeth at Pemberley in December was evolving, month by month, into a young woman of quiet confidence and unexpected humor. She played piano for guests now without prompting, spoke to strangers without trembling, and had developed a dry wit that Elizabeth claimed full credit for and Darcy blamed entirely on her influence.
"She told Colonel Fitzwilliam last week that his dancing reminded her of a startled horse," Darcy reported, with an expression caught between horror and pride.
"She is not wrong."
"She is my sixteen-year-old sister. She should not be comparing military officers to livestock."
"She should if the comparison is accurate. I am teaching her discernment."
"You are teaching her impertinence."
"Impertinence IS discernment, properly deployed."
He shook his head. He was smiling.
The evenings at Pemberley had become their particular treasure. After dinner, after Georgiana retired, after the house settled into its nighttime quiet, they found each other in the library. Always the library. It had been a library where everything began, and it was a library where they returned, again and again, as though the room itself were a compass point.
Tonight, the fire was burning well. Rain tapped against the tall windows, a gentle percussion that made the room feel enclosed and warm. Elizabeth was curled in the window seat with a novel, her feet tucked beneath her, a cup of tea cooling on the sill beside her. Darcy sat in the armchair by the fire withcorrespondence he was not reading, because he was looking at her.
He was always looking at her. Three months of marriage had not dimmed the habit. If anything, it had deepened, because now he was looking at her with the accumulated weight of every moment they had shared: the library at Netherfield, the rainstorm, the garden, the argument, the letter, the gallery, the night under the stars, the wedding, the mornings waking up beside her, the sound of her laughter in his house, the sight of her walking through his grounds, the knowledge that she was his and he was hers and neither of them had settled for anything less than everything.
She looked up. "You are staring, Mr. Darcy."
"I am admiring, Mrs. Darcy."
"And what is it you admire?"
The words were an echo, a callback to the gallery visit months ago, and they both heard it: the same question, the same answer, but spoken now from a different place, a place of certainty and belonging and the quiet joy of people who had found what they were looking for and intended to keep it.
"Everything," he said. "I admire everything."
She set down her book. Something in his voice, or in the firelight, or in the particular quality of the rain against the windows, or perhaps just in the look on his face, made her pulse quicken with the familiar, never-diminished electricity of wanting him. Three months, and she still wanted him with a fierceness that startled her. She suspected she would want him in thirty years with the same fierceness, and the thought was not alarming but comforting: a constant in a changing world.
She crossed the room. He watched her come, his eyes darkening, his correspondence forgotten. She stood in front of his chair, and he looked up at her, and the firelight played across both their faces, and the moment was perfect in its simplicity: two people, one room, the understanding that passes between those who have been through fire together and emerged not unscathed but forged.
She settled into his lap, her knees on either side of his thighs, and his hands found her waist as naturally as breathing.
"This is becoming a habit," he murmured.
"A very good habit."
"The best habit." He kissed the sapphire pendant at her throat -- she wore it always, his mother's stone warming to her skin, becoming hers. "You are wearing the necklace."
"I am always wearing the necklace."
"I am always grateful."
She kissed him. Slowly at first, the kind of kiss that starts as a greeting and becomes a conversation: her mouth telling his things about her day, her thoughts, the particular way the light had fallen on the lake that afternoon and made her think of him, which was redundant because everything made her think of him.
The kiss deepened. His hands moved from her waist to her back, finding the laces of her gown with the practiced ease of a man who had learned this particular language fluently. She worked at his cravat, their fingers busy, their mouths busier, the room warming around them with a heat that had nothing to do with the fire.
